Lessons from boom and bust in New Mexico http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.5/lessons-from-boom-and-bust-in-new-mexico
What we can learn from the oil and gas roller coaster ride in Farmington and beyond. [GALLERY]

Today, however, the most important signs loom over gas station parking lots, announcing that gasoline is selling for just over two bucks, cheaper than it’s been for a half decade. Here, where folks tend to drive long distances, mostly in large pickup trucks and SUVs, the prices elicit joy: U.S. motorists will save more than $2 billion per week thanks to low gas prices, and the locals here are happy to get their share.

And yet, those falling numbers also make people anxious. Aztec is the smallest of a triad of towns that include Farmington, population 45,000, and Bloomfield, population 8,000, in the heart of the San Juan Basin, 10,000 square miles of mesas and canyons and scrub-covered high-desert plains that sprawl across much of northwestern New Mexico and into Colorado. The region’s shale, sandstone and coal beds, souvenirs of an ancient inland sea and its swampy shoreline, store vast quantities of coal, oil and, especially, natural gas, which is so abundant it seeps out of the earth unbidden in places.

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For nearly a century, the economic fortunes of these three communities have hinged on fossil fuel extraction. While environmental regulations, national policy and subsidies for energy companies can affect the situation, nothing does so more than the price of the commodities. When oil or natural gas prices rise, so do the fortunes of Aztec, Farmington and Bloomfield. When they drop, the effects ripple through the economy, from the dozens of oil- and gas-related businesses, to local and state governments.

Jason Sandel is the executive vice president of Aztec Well, a conglomerate of drilling and oilfield service companies run by his family. Back in 2008, Aztec Well and the rest of the region were battered by a crash in the price of natural gas, the Basin’s cash crop. So Sandel and his troops turned to crude, riding the record-breaking wave of high oil prices that ignited booms in North Dakota, southeastern New Mexico, Wyoming and Colorado. By mid-2014, Aztec Well and its subsidiaries had 825 employees and 14 rigs drilling, some as close as the south side of the Basin and others as far away as Utah and Pennsylvania.

But late last summer, global demand for petroleum faltered. The U.S. was extracting more oil than it had in decades, and the Saudis, rather than curtailing production to stabilize prices, decided to just keep pumping away in order to retain their market share. “We are living in the confirmed world of a price war,” says Daniel Fine, associate director of the New Mexico Center for Energy Policy at New Mexico Tech. And the Saudis seem to be winning. The global oil price slumped from nearly $115 per barrel in June of last year, to less than $50 in January. And even as other Westerners dusted off their Hummers and SUVs and happily hit the road, town, county and state governments in the oil patch, from Alaska to Texas, braced for the aftershocks.

When I meet Sandel in his office, I’m a little surprised: He resembles a Brooklyn hipster, albeit a burly one, with a long, well-mannered beard, tortoiseshell Ray Ban prescription glasses and a stylish button-up shirt. If a lumbersexual is a fashion-conscious urbanite who looks theoretically ready to do some clear-cutting, then Sandel could serve as the standard-bearer for stylishly casual “roughnecksexual” oil-and-gas dudes. I refrain from sharing this thought.

Sandel is coping with once again having to scale back his enterprise, laying off workers and stacking rigs in the yard, but he is happy to talk, as long as I don’t intend to “spin the article negatively, (to push the community) away from energy development due to its volatility.” Yet no matter how I spin the story, there’s no hiding from the facts: To hitch one’s fate to fossil fuels is to take a wild roller-coaster ride that can overrun other economic sectors and fray the social fabric. And the carny driving this ride is not the local community, but the global marketplace.

I’m not here, however, to build an economic or even environmental argument for eschewing oil and gas development — we’ve heard all of those before. I’m here to learn how the roller coaster works, and to glean from Sandel any lessons, or warnings, he’s gained from experiencing two busts in less than 10 years –– lessons he can share with the neo-boomtowns, now busting, of the shale revolution.

From Aztec Well’s headquarters, you can see the company’s fenced-in yards, filled with trucks and drilling apparatus; the Aztec Speedway, also run by the Sandel family, which on warm Saturday nights becomes a chest-rattling shrine to the internal combustion engine; and the regional office for Oklahoma-based WPX Energy, one of the biggest oil and gas producers around. And just over there is the site where, in 1921, the Aztec Oil Syndicate drilled the first producing well in the basin, triggering the first boom and putting the region, and the state, on the path to its fossil fuel destiny.

In the decades that followed, the industry sprang forth mostly untethered, acquiring lucrative oil leases in sketchy deals with a newly formed Navajo government, “fracking” wells by exploding nitroglycerin in them. But in the 1930s, the state also began to insist that industry return a little in exchange for all it was taking, by implementing a severance tax, a school tax and a conservation tax, all on hydrocarbon production.

As a result, when El Paso Natural Gas built a pipeline in 1951 from the San Juan Basin to California, opening up vast new markets and sparking a transformative boom, the state was able to reap some of the bounty. At the time, Farmington was a quiet ag town of a few thousand people, surrounded by so many orchards that the train up to Durango was known as the Red Apple Flyer. In just a few years, it ballooned to nearly 20,000 people.

In 1963, Sandel’s grandparents, Wayne and Stella, started Aztec Well. The industry was in a lull at the time, but the roller coaster rocketed back up a decade later, when a series of energy crises sent oil prices into the stratosphere. In 1980, a mind-boggling 62,000 wells were drilled in the U.S., about three times the number drilled during the recent shale boom. New Mexico officials again had fiscal foresight, creating a permanent fund fed by severance tax revenue, something that could provide help when the oil and gas ran out.

In an uncanny foreshadowing of the future, however, global oil prices ebbed, and OPEC’s market share shrank. In response, the cartel flooded the market with petroleum, causing the price to crash at roughly the same time that the feds deregulated the natural gas market, causing that commodity to lose value, as well. The West’s energy fields were abruptly abandoned.

Jason Sandel was just heading into middle school at the time. His grandfather had passed away, and his father, Jerry, was at the company’s helm. He kept it afloat by holding on to only “the best-of-the-best employees, (making sure) they were receiving an honest day’s wage for an honest day’s work,” says Jason Sandel. Their one rig was entirely staffed by salaried toolpushers, or rig managers, and welders were constructing cattle guards for public use. As often as not, payroll checks came right out of the family’s savings account.

A “ghost town” feel settled into Farmington, broken only by an early ’90s surge, when companies, hoping to take advantage of federal tax credits before they expired, started drilling for coalbed methane. And while the situation inspired some talk about diversifying the economy, folks mostly felt angry at their impotence. Jason Sandel recalls “a rise of conservative attitudes and nationalism as a result of feeling out of control.”

Sandel, by then a young man, wasn’t having any of it. “All of my life, (my father) told me to stay out of the oil and gas industry. It’s dangerous, it’s cyclical,” he says. So instead, he pursued politics, his father’s “hobby” — the elder Sandel served in the New Mexico Legislature for 30 years, finally retiring in 2001 after he lost his bid to become lieutenant governor. Jason Sandel got a degree in political science from the University of New Mexico, going on to become an analyst and then chief of staff for the New Mexico Senate majority leader. Like his father, he’s a Democrat, an anomaly in this very conservative district, dominated by an industry that tends to side with the GOP. He worked for Bill Richardson, back when he was in Congress, and continues to donate to Democratic causes and politicians, including New Mexico Sens. Martin Heinrich and Tom Udall. “I love politics,” says Sandel. “It’s something I really geek out on.”

But after his mother died, Sandel decided to come home to raise his own family in Farmington and help with the business, signing on full-time at Aztec Well in 2001. At the time, the region was more than a decade into the coalbed methane push, and there was little reason to think it would ever let up. Sandel learned the business but kept his political skills polished. He got elected to Farmington’s city council in 2006 and served for eight years, pushing for quality-of-life improvements, such as bicycle-friendly streets and better infrastructure to deal with summertime flash floods. He supported economic development and tried to steer the city, which runs its own electric utility, away from purchasing more coal power.

Sandel also advocated for the oil and gas industry, pushing back against regulations and, especially, talking up the industry’s positive economic impact. He endorsed a move by state legislators from the San Juan Basin to punish communities that regulate the oil and gas industry by withholding severance tax funds, and he relaxed regulations on drilling within Farmington, which already has more than 300 wells within the city limits.

“Should we show him the scare map?” asks Maureen Joe, assistant field manager for the Farmington Office of the Bureau of Land Management. Joe, a small woman with shiny black hair, seems to delight in the prospect of frightening a reporter. Dave Mankiewicz, another assistant field manager — the curmudgeonly TV-style cop to Joe’s cheerful one — hands me the map, showing every well ever drilled in the San Juan Basin, with little red dots for gas, black ones for oil.

It is scary. The northern and central sections of the Basin are almost solid red; in the south and west, dense swarms of black dots string out along the oil-bearing formations. Dark pinpricks surround Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Huerfano Mountain, or Dzil Na’oodilii, where First Woman and First Man and then Changing Woman lived — a sort of Garden of Eden in Navajo cosmology — is embroidered with red and black. The BLM office we sit in, on a fine piece of real estate in the upper-class part of town, has three wells within a quarter mile, and a pumpjack grinds away right next to a golf course green down the road.

To find a stretch of land anywhere in the core of the Basin that hasn’t been drilled or isn’t covered by roads, tanks, pipes or some other hydrocarbon-related infrastructure is nearly impossible — the infrastructure is the landscape. “We’ve got so much pipeline in the ground, it’s like rebar,” says Mankiewicz. “If you had an earthquake, the ground wouldn’t even shake.”

The industry is similarly entangled with the community’s streetscapes, culture and economy. A drive around the Aztec-Farmington-Bloomfield triangle is a bit like a cruise through a giant open-air oil-and-gas mall, with roadside businesses peddling goods and services for every link of the hydrocarbon production chain: Elite Swabbing Service, Compressco, Weatherford Fishing Tools and Permian Power Tong. It’s not entirely monolithic: Toolpusher’s Supply, for example, is just across from the Adult Video store, which is watched over sternly by a billboard showing Jesus. And Halliburton’s yard, brimming with giant trucks and byzantine equipment, is sandwiched between a Great Harvest Bread place and a Walgreens on Farmington’s main drag. Some residents of a trailer park just behind it got sick and were evacuated in 2006 after an acidic fracking fluid spill.

When any of these businesses make a sale, they pay a gross receipts tax to the state, city and county. The businesses pay property taxes, on their land, equipment and oil and gas production. Producers pay severance and emergency school taxes on the gross value of oil or gas that they sell to the state, in addition to royalties to the feds, the state, tribes or private landowners. And the operators of the natural gas plant north of Bloomfield, where the sci-fi-skyscraper-like distillation columns tower directly over the shrines and graves of a Catholic cemetery, pay state natural gas processor’s taxes.

These funds, in turn, pay for everything from firefighters’ salaries to roads to day-to-day governmental operations. Earnings from the state’s $14 billion Land Grant Permanent Fund, which is fed almost entirely by oil and gas royalties on state lands, support New Mexico’s public schools. The Severance Tax Permanent Fund’s earnings are allocated to capital projects across the state, for everything from sewage systems to school playgrounds to a jaguar exhibit at the Albuquerque zoo. A 2014 New Mexico Tax Research Institute analysis found that at least one-third of the state’s general fund comes from the mélange of taxes and royalties paid by the industry.

Layered on top of that are philanthropic donations from industry, for everything from the public library, to the United Way, to the regional symphony and Farmington’s museum, which will soon feature a pretty spectacular “Energy Wing.” Just down the road from the aforementioned BLM offices, San Juan College’s new $16 million School of Energy facility is nearing completion. More than $8 million of the cash came from BP, Merrion Oil & Gas and other industry donors, with $5 million coming from the severance tax permanent fund.

This progressive effort to make industry pay its way has effectively put the governments of New Mexico — and Farmington and San Juan County — into the oil and gas business. The upside is that those communities get to share in the profits. The downside is that everyone, from the toolpusher to the symphony-goer, is dependent on an extremely volatile global market. And while the state can tolerate busts with help from its flush permanent funds, local governments have no such cushion. Any efforts to rein in or regulate industry, or even try to whittle a new leg or two for the one-legged economic stool, are readily interpreted as attacks on schools, local governments and, really, the people who live here.

“The drilling rig is the crystal ball,” says Sandel. “As go drilling rigs, so goes the rest of the economy. I can say, by name, 50 people who have a job for each drilling rig going to work.” Multiply that by an average salary of about $75,000 and add in the gross receipt taxes on a $1 million to $10 million drilling job, and then multiply that by the number of drill rigs in operation — the rig count — and you’ve got a mighty big impact.

Back in the summer of 2008, 40 rigs were running in the San Juan Basin and 2,000 nationwide, the result of a long run of high natural gas prices. Aztec had 14 rigs operating in the region, and it and its subsidiaries — trucking, equipment rental, oilfield services companies — employed more than 700 people. Gross annual revenues were in the $100 million range, marking 400 percent growth since 2000 and easily making the company Aztec’s biggest single source of gross revenue taxes. “They were good years,” Sandel says wistfully. “It’s what built this building.”

The BLM’s Farmington Field Office handed out drilling permits — 3,500 over a five-year period — like a bank hands out lollipops, and the distinction between public employee and private industry blurred. The district manager at the time, Steve Henke, received a few favors from the industry, like trips to golf tournaments and an $8,000 donation to Henke’s son’s baseball team. When he retired from the BLM in 2010, he became president of the New Mexico Oil and Gas Association, an industry lobbying group.

Federal royalties from wells in the San Juan Basin topped $700 million one year, and state severance tax revenues were close to $1 billion. Schools got a per-pupil funding increase, allowing the Farmington district to hire more teachers and up their salaries. The local construction industry was going gangbusters to accommodate new businesses and residents.

Industry leaders cringed when, in mid-2008, New Mexico implemented the “pit rule,” one of the strongest regulations regarding the disposal of drilling wastewater. Yet it did nothing to slow drilling. Meanwhile, industry cheered as both political parties, and even the Sierra Club, touted natural gas, which emits about half the carbon dioxide and far fewer other pollutants than coal when it’s burned, as a “bridge fuel” to cleaner renewables. It seemed as if the boom was just beginning.

But as T. Greg Merrion, president of Merrion Oil and Gas, a local company, told me, there’s an old saying in the industry: “Nothing helps low prices like low prices, and nothing hurts high prices like high prices.” Soaring natural gas prices, with help from government subsidies and a fortuitous pairing of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, had spurred a frenzy of drilling in shale formations nationwide, most notably the Marcellus shale in the East. Suddenly, the market was glutted, and prices plummeted.

Between October of 2008 and January of 2009, Aztec Well idled 75 percent of its equipment, and almost as many workers. The company’s annual revenues were cut in half. The San Juan Basin alone lost an estimated 5,000 jobs, and the Farmington metro area went from having one of the lowest jobless rates in the country to having one of its highest in just a few years.

The pain spread to the city and county and then up to the state level. Since almost all of the industry-related taxes and royalties are based on the gross value of oil and natural gas, the price drop resulted in a proportional hit to state coffers. That rippled down to the schools. In Farmington, they were saved from mass layoffs by relying on attrition, such as teachers leaving to follow their spouses to other oilfields.

“It was ominous,” says Farmington City Manager Rob Mayes, who was faced with a sudden loss of nearly 20 percent of gross receipt tax revenues, the city’s main source of funding. “It just fell off a cliff.”

“Every time we have a decline in price,” says County Chief Executive Officer Kim Carpenter, “that equates to several million in less input to the general fund.” Carpenter’s annual county budget introductory letters serve as a sort of chronicle of the deepening bust, and are filled with woe and the sound of gnashing teeth. Between 2009 and 2012, Carpenter could offer only one piece of good news: Farmington got itself an Olive Garden.

Meanwhile, the local industry had to sit and watch drilling go nuts in other parts of the nation. Even as natural gas prices crashed, oil prices shot upward thanks to high global demand, sparking shale-drilling rushes from North Dakota to Texas. Initially, the San Juan Basin was left out — it had been too tied up in coalbed methane drilling to make much effort to drill shale, particularly for oil. But you couldn’t argue with the price signals.

“We had to chase the oil,” says Sandel. “We had built up so much equipment, and there was a likelihood it would never all work here again. So we sought out other areas and became a national company.” Aztec Well opened offices in southern New Mexico’s Permian Basin, Kansas, Utah and Pennsylvania.

Other local companies took a similar tack. Pesco, which began building gas field equipment back in the ’70s, started building oil field equipment, too. A company that had long manufactured compressors for local gas companies began shipping out of state. Only the fact that those companies kept their bases here, rather than uprooting and following the next boom, kept the community from drying up altogether. Workers who had settled into the area’s relatively affordable suburban homes also stayed, commuting to distant oilfields for two-week-on, two-week-off cycles. It was a form of economic diversification, albeit a limited one — chasing after oil and gas, wherever they might be.

Then, starting in 2012, the drill rigs returned to the ash-colored earth of the southern San Juan Basin, this time looking for oil in an old play near Chaco Canyon and the mostly Navajo communities of Lybrook and Counselor. It has hardly been a boom — at most, a dozen rigs have operated at one time — but the oilfield traffic and activity has been rough on the locals, while most of the jobs and other economic benefits go to Farmington. The exception is royalty payments to Navajo allotment holders, which, when prices are high, can provide a big bonus to impoverished families.

But late last year, oil prices started shrinking, the victim, again, of that “high prices hurt high prices” rule, and of the laws of global supply and demand. Those allotment royalty checks? They’re about half of what they were last June. When I visited Sandel in late January, his company had pulled five rigs out of operation, representing a loss of millions of dollars of potential revenue. By the end of February, just two rigs were running in the Basin; nationwide, tens of thousands of oilfield workers lost their jobs.

The full impact of the latest bust has yet to trickle down to the rest of the economy. The general public might be oblivious now. But give it a few months, says Bob Beckley, the owner of 3Rivers Brewery and Restaurant in downtown Farmington. “Everyone enjoys driving around on all that cheap gas,” he says, “but they don’t understand how important the oil and gas industry is to us.”

Back in August, New Mexico state economists expected $6.4 billion in revenue for the 2016 fiscal year; in early February, that estimate had plunged by $200 million, thanks entirely to dropping oil prices. City, county and school officials are bracing for the blow, looking for places to cut costs. Aztec Well has no place left to send its rigs besides its own yard. “It’s the uncertainty of the commodity price that’s driving how fast this is going,” says Sandel. “We don’t know what the floor is.”

On a Wednesday morning in February, a group of oil and gas managerial types, economic development folks and a few non-industry business owners gather for a workshop at San Juan College called “Thriving in the New Normal.” It’s both a grim and an optimistic title, one that acknowledges that it may be years before prices go back to where they were, but that it’s possible for local businesses to survive and even prosper, nevertheless.

Perhaps someone here will have a big vision for how the community can get off this roller-coaster ride once and for all. That’s a vision I have yet to encounter during any of my visits to city hall, to county offices and to Farmington’s eerily quiet historic downtown, where each block has at least one payday loan joint and a couple of vacant storefronts.

Most of what I hear is a version of what one man says at the workshop: “Sure, diversifying the economy is fine, but we can’t forget what we do best.” And that, of course, is fossil fuels. One government official tells me in all seriousness that newly “robust” environmentalists are a bigger threat than price volatility. Another says that the local economy isn’t really that dependent on oil and gas, after all. The prevailing sentiment, even in the workshop, is this: You just gotta hunker down, tighten your belt, and endure. It’ll come back. It always does.

Except when it doesn’t. Prices will go up, sure, but natural gas production has been falling in the San Juan Basin since 1999, despite an almost unprecedented frenzy of drilling between 2003 and 2008. What happens when the cash crop dries up?

I find an answer in an unexpected place: at the monolithic headquarters of Merrion Oil & Gas, which overlooks Farmington from the same complex that houses city hall.

“The answer is easy,” says T. Greg Merrion, president of the company since 1992. “You’ve got to diversify. But it’s complicated. It’s like turning the Titanic. You gotta change the way you think, change the way you do things.”

Merrion’s father started the company back in the 1960s and, judging from the headquarters, it’s done all right. Paintings by prominent Southwestern artists adorn the lobby walls, and a huge sculpture — sandstone and glass panels jutting from a rust-colored steel base — dominates the space. Merrion, dressed in a North Face fleece, baggy jeans and running shoes, actually relishes the bust as an opportunity to go bargain-shopping for oil and gas properties. As a well-known philanthropist, however, he doesn’t want to see the community suffer.

After the 2008 bust hit, Merrion got together with other community leaders and hired consultants. They suggested focusing on agriculture and tourism, and courting light manufacturers and health-care providers. Proposals include everything from converting the nearby massive coal plants to natural gas to better promoting mountain biking and OHV trails and the area’s Native American culture. They rejiggered the local economic development agency with this in mind, but getting there “is a marathon, not a sprint,” says Merrion. It takes time. It takes money. And, of course, it takes political will.

And that, says Sandel, another surprising advocate of economic diversification, is what is lacking; it’s one of the reasons he didn’t run for a third term in city government. “We do very little as a community to market this stuff,” he says. “No one can carry that vision, carry that torch to bring people together.”

The carwash on Aztec’s edge is doing a brisk business on a Friday afternoon, as workers stream into town from the gas patch and line up their big white trucks to try to scrub off the mud, which is still axle-deep out on the mesas and north-facing slopes. There is enough work merely maintaining the existing wells and infrastructure in the San Juan Basin to keep business going. I’m headed the other way, back out into the patch, along a rutted road and past some byzantine equipment, to the Alien Run trailhead, one of the places Sandel would like to promote.

I lace up my shoes and hit the trail, which winds through juniper and piñon, occasionally crossing undulating sections of slickrock. It’s a meditative place to run, despite or maybe because of the inescapable background drone of gas wells and compressors. Aztec locals established the trails on BLM land several years back, naming it for a purported 1948 UFO crash in the area. Aztec once attempted to market the crash as a tourist draw, à la Roswell, even hosting its own UFO conference. It didn’t take, but the trails are popular, and the town hosts a mountain bike race here every May.

Intrepid explorers also head out onto the county’s gas-patch roads in search of dozens of natural arches, remote Chacoan pueblos and artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Black Place,” which, ironically, was “discovered” thanks to nearby oil and gas development. The Bisti Badlands south of Farmington draw early spring crowds, a surprisingly high proportion of them from Switzerland, Germany, France and other parts of Europe. Shoppers from at least a 100-mile radius come to Farmington’s sprawling mall, two super Wal-Marts, a Target, Sam’s Club, and a herd of chain restaurants. And Farmington still lives up to its name: The Navajo Agricultural Products Industries farms, with the help of copious irrigation, have transformed a huge swath of high desert south of the city into a Midwestern-esque plain of potato, corn, wheat and alfalfa fields.

This is economic diversification, sure, but it’s happened without a plan, and no one’s figured out how to monetize it. During my hour-long run, the gas wells I pass pump hundreds of tax dollars into state, county and school coffers; I, however, contribute absolutely nothing. When I buy a case of those orange peanut-butter-cracker things from Sam’s Club, I’m helping Sam back in Arkansas, but not the city or the state, since New Mexico exempts food and medicine from the gross receipts tax. If you work in Farmington’s leisure and hospitality sector, you’ll earn, on average, $12,000 per year, compared to $90,000 for local petroleum engineers. And since the NAPI farms are owned by the Navajo Nation, they’re mostly tax exempt. Economic development is as much about creating mechanisms to capture cash as it is about simply attracting it. The state has clearly demonstrated that with oil and gas.

With that in mind, I ask both Merrion and Sandel a final question: “If you could give the new, and future, boomtowns of the shale revolution one piece of advice, what would it be?”

“My advice to boomtowns is to establish a community ‘boom fund’ that would be modeled after New Mexico’s severance tax permanent fund — but structured for communities as opposed to the state,” Sandel says. “I’d then dedicate a specific portion of the interest off this fund for the purpose of economic development and diversification.” It seems like an obvious approach, and Merrion answers my question almost identically. But Farmington’s been busting and booming for 95 years, and there is still no community “boom fund,” and the city has made no serious efforts to diversify the economy.

“What I want, 20 to 30 years from now, is for someone to say, ‘Boy, I’m sure glad our community decided to diversify,’ ” says Merrion. “It’s never too late to start.” Then he looks up at a replica of a Puebloan pot sitting on the mantle. Perhaps he’s thinking of the Chacoan culture that, a millennium ago, also modified the landscape in ways that are still visible and, ultimately, went bust. Most likely driven by drought and overconsumption of local resources, the people pulled up stakes and headed east and south, to the banks of the Rio Grande, to Zuni, to Hopi. “Well,” says Merrion, “it could be too late. There are communities that have lived or died by production of natural resources.”

]]>No publisherInfographicOilEnergy & IndustryEconomyNot on homepage2015/03/16 04:15:00 GMT-6Articlehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.5/lessons-from-boom-and-bust-in-new-mexico/sidebarblurb.2015-03-10.0428272372
No publisher2015/03/16 04:15:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbDon't expect oil prices to rebound anytime soonhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/dont-expect-oil-prices-to-rebound-anytime-soon
Global forces conspire to keep energy prices low, for better and worse.It’s not even 8 a.m. and rush hour is on in northwestern New Mexico. Dozens of big white trucks and water tankers, neon flags flying, head north to the gas patch. I’m driving south, through Aztec, and as I pass the retro-orange A&W on the edge of town, I pull up alongside a drilling rig. The thing’s huge, too huge, it seems, to be rolling along the same road as my little Nissan. Yet the strange, rolling infrastructure has been a familiar site around here for decades — back in 1948, when a UFO purportedly crashed out on a nearby mesa, the government disguised the recovery mission as an oil and gas drilling operation, which makes perfect sense.

But rolling drill rigs are becoming a little less common around here. Back in 2008 natural gas prices crashed, putting a huge dent in extraction of the region’s main cash crop. Now oil prices have slumped, too, dealing another blow to the main local economic driver.

A pumpjack, with Farmington and the Sleeping Ute Mountain in the background.

Jonathan Thompson

My efforts to photograph the drill rig make me late to the “Thriving in the New Normal” workshop at San Juan College in Farmington, but I arrive in time to hear Dr. Daniel Fine, from the New Mexico Energy Policy Center, deliver a grim speech. Tall and thin in a rumpled suit and wire-rimmed glasses, it's fair to say Fine doesn't fit into this crowd of big men, most of whom work in the oil and gas industry, their blonde hair shorn close to the skull, wearing beat-up boots and fleece vests adorned with company logos.

Fine is hardly an inspirational speaker, nor is he an optimist. The Saudis, he says, have waged a price war on the American shale drilling revolution and its producers. And the Saudis are winning.

Fine, who has testified before Congress on energy issues, lays out a world of geopolitical intrigue and scheming that plays out in the oil and gas fields just outside the room in which he speaks. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has long been concerned about the shale revolution in the U.S., and its potential for eroding the cartel's global market share. And OPEC officials have kept a very close eye on what's going on in North Dakota's Bakken, in the Permian Basin in Texas and southern New Mexico and, more recently, in the San Juan Basin in northwestern New Mexico. The U.S. rig count, Fine says, is translated into Arabic shortly after it's published here.

Saudi oil ministers were well aware, then, that while the shale revolution has been a rousing success, pumping U.S. production up to levels that haven't been seen since the mid 1980s, it is also expensive to do — costing three to ten times the production price of a Saudi Arabian barrel of oil. Many U.S. companies have gone deeply into debt to finance their costly drilling operations, making them especially vulnerable to any decreases in oil prices.

Sign, San Juan Basin, New Mexico.

Jonathan Thompson

During the summer of 2014, oil prices began to ebb slightly as global supplies caught up with and then exceeded global demand. It was the window Saudi Arabia had been looking for, and rather than curtail production to stabilize prices, as many expected the nation to do, it continued to pump oil at a high rate, even going so far as to offer discounts to Asian nations. Prices plummeted from $100 per barrel to $80 to right around $50 today, a level that had seemed impossible in July. Already, the oil and gas industry here in the U.S. has taken serious casualties. The number of rigs operating — a barometer of the industry’s economic activity — has crashed. Oilfield service companies have laid off thousands of workers. Boomtowns are on the verge of going bust. Even apartment rental rates in North Dakota’s oil patch have started to wane.

“It’s similar to 1985 and 1986, when the same OPEC offensive took place,” says Fine. Back then, it took more than two years for prices to recover, and far longer for the industry and the communities that relied on it to get out of the hole. While price drops take just a few months to be manifested in rig counts and employment levels, the response to price increases is usually a lot slower. “Will oil rebound to $100? I’m here to say no.”

Sure, low prices at the pump will encourage American drivers to buy bigger cars and drive them more miles, thereby increasing demand, according to the “nothing helps low prices like low prices” supply-and-demand adage. And someday, Saudi Arabia, having worn down the American oil industry adequately, will start cutting production to bring prices back up, if only just to help their OPEC cartel-mates like Venezuela and Iran, which, like America’s “petro-states” such as Alaska and Wyoming, are struggling mightily under the low prices.

But another dynamic that’s currently playing out is, on the one hand, keeping prices from falling more than they have: Major oil traders and brokers, from Shell to Koch Industries, are buying up millions of barrels of oil while prices are low, and storing them in supertankers off the coast. This helps prop up demand now. But when prices go back up — even by a relatively small amount — the brokers can sell all that oil at a huge profit. Doing so will flood the market with oil, pushing prices right back down, perhaps even lower than they are now. One analyst even suggested that prices could hit $20 per barrel. That may be a little extreme, but it also seems unlikely that they’ll go back up to break-even drilling prices for producers in America’s shale plays anytime soon.

“There’s a new reality,” says Fine. “And it’s uncomfortable.”

I’m at the workshop to try to better understand what that “new normal” will look like, and to see how low oil and natural gas prices will ripple through the economy, the culture and the landscape in Farmington and beyond. Stay tuned for my High Country News cover story on the topic, online and in print March 16, as well as more dispatches from the oil and gas patch here at hcn.org.

]]>No publisherOilNew MexicoEconomyEnergy & Industry2015/03/08 12:55:00 GMT-6ArticleJanuary exodushttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.4/january-exodus
HCN’ers get into the backcountry, editor Betsy Marston sees Berlin and art director Cindy Wehling takes a trip to Hawaii. As if the short, cold January days were not depressing enough, it was also a bit lonely at High Country News’ mothership in Paonia, as a good portion of the staff deserted us for some or all of the month. Copyeditor extraordinaire Diane Sylvain made her annual pilgrimage to St. Benedict’s Monastery near Snowmass, Colorado, for several days, leaving the rest of us to try to avoid lapsing into commas. Meanwhile, art director Cindy Wehling bailed to Hawaii for a week of well-deserved vacation.

Writers on the Range editor Betsy Marston gallivanted around the world, to Ireland and Spain, before spending a few weeks in Berlin, Germany. Her husband, HCN’s legendary publisher Ed Marston, wrote: Berlin is thus far living up to expectations. Bitter and raw “suicide” weather; overcast even when Berliners call it sunny; and gruff store employees who think retail service is telling you to stop bothering them. But a wonderful city nonetheless because of its fascinating past and present and all the foreigners here, in a nation that used to be 98 percent German.

Then there was a mass exodus into the Grand Canyon, via rafts, by Web editor Tay Wiles, contributing editor Sarah Gilman and correspondent Krista Langlois and contributor Danielle Venton, along with many others. They got on the river at Lees Ferry on New Year’s Day following one of the biggest snows on record, their rafts covered with several inches of powder. But over the next three weeks, as they made their way through the Big Ditch, the weather improved. So much so, in fact, that it was perfect for a wedding: Langlois married her beau, Jesse Mogler. The bride, reputedly, wore a lifejacket; no word on whether the groom was equally prepared.

VISITORSFortunately, our solitude was broken by one visitor: Erin Minks of Alamosa, Colorado, who stopped by with her daughter, Noelle, while tracking down “a nest” of old college friends who live near Paonia. Erin had recently unearthed an issue of the magazine that she’d saved, from over 15 years ago. She says it influenced her work as a staffer for Mark Udall, Colorado’s former senator, and that she plans to keep reading in her next job: forest planner for Rio Grande National Forest.

CORRECTIONJudith Lewis Mernit, in her Feb. 2 story about Gov. Jerry Brown’s uncertain climate leadership (“The Limits of Legacy”), said the organization 350.org led a Feb. 7 climate march in Oakland, California. A number of environmental and labor groups collaborated on the march, of which 350.org was just one.

]]>No publisherDear Friends2015/03/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleLong lost GoPro resurfaces; owl attacks in Oregonhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.3/long-lost-gopro-resurfaces-owl-attacks-in-oregon
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.IN THE DEEPAllisa and Mark Oliger, from Durango, Colorado, like to spend New Year’s Day diving, often in the cold, murky waters of Lake Powell. Typically, they see a few fish, maybe find sunken treasures like golf balls or broken fishing poles. But this year, 30 feet underwater, they found a GoPro camera — the kind people attach to their bodies to record both the mundane and the insane. The camera, in a waterproof case, survived, as did its memory card, which held video clips and photos of young men on a road trip. Allisa scoured YouTube for similar videos and — surprisingly- — found a match. Turns out the camera belonged to a guy named Dan Burkovskiy, who had made, and partially filmed, his cross-country moving trip from Massachusetts to California last June. During his group’s stop at Lake Powell, their kayak flipped, sending the camera to a watery, albeit temporary, grave. Oliger found Burkovskiy on Facebook and returned his camera, attracting national media attention in the process. That’s the good news. The bad news? When the camera was recovered, it was plastered with zebra mussels, a pesky invasive species.

BIRDLANDOh, if only Ron Jaecks had a GoPro that Tuesday morning in January. Jaecks was doing his usual run through Bush’s Pasture Park in Salem, Oregon, when someone — or something — suddenly ripped the hat from his head, puncturing his scalp, according to the Statesman Journal. “It was like a huge electric shock ran through my body, but also like I got hit in the head with a two-by-four all at the same time,” Jaecks told the Journal. “Or maybe a strike of lightning.” Having no clue what was happening, Jaecks screamed and ran in circles. His now hatless pate was hit again, and this time he realized that it was a winged creature — a gigantic bat, he feared. But the friend he called, biology professor David Craig, theorized that it was an owl, which attack more often than you might think. In 2012, parts of some Washington state parks were closed after at least six such attacks, and in recent months, owls have dug their talons into folks in Florida and Missouri. They seem to be attracted to, or irritated by, long hair and ponytails. Memo to dawn and dusk park-goers: Wear a helmet.

CRAZYTOWNRecent research suggests that living at high altitude- can affect brain chemistry in such a way as to induce either euphoria or depression. Lack of oxygen to the brain, or hypoxia, might explain both your “Rocky Mountain High” and the Interior West’s high rate of suicide.

Witness Silverton, Colorado, population 500 or so, elevation 9,318 feet. During the long winters, when the influx of tourists slows to a trickle, snow piles up in the streets and avalanche danger sometimes closes both routes out of town, tensions run high. Residents pack town, county and school board meetings, and engage in late-night, spittle-heavy debates, arguing endlessly over whether the county or town should pay for the ambulance or ATVs should be allowed on town streets. The latest fracas, simmering for months and now at a rolling boil, might be the most heated in recent memory, seemingly drawing in every resident and then some. It’s also one of the oddest. Tired of the long-running feud between the town administrator and the longtime public works director — who wields great power, since he’s in charge of the snowplows — the town board forced the two to publicly pledge to be nice to one another. The public works director then broke the promise at a local watering hole, allegedly warning folks that “you’re either with us, or against us.” The town board launched an investigation, and both employees were ultimately fired.

That’s when the hypoxia really kicked in: The public works director’s supporters launched a campaign of nastiness, boycotting businesses owned by those who favored the firing, pelting The Silverton Standard & the Miner with vitriolic letters and trying to recall one town board member. In January, after the polarized town board failed to agree on a replacement for another member — who had left town for lower elevations and higher sanity — two infuriated residents started screaming at officials. Local law enforcement had to extricate them, and town hall was closed to the public so that those employees who hadn’t quit, been fired or gone crazy could get some work done.

“It’s easy to look at what’s been going on in Silverton and see it as an implosion,” San Juan County Sheriff Bruce Conrad told the Durango Herald. “But divisions like this are cyclic. We go through it, time to time, and we’ll be out of it shortly.” Some hope that the Feb. 10 recall election will end the fight. The less optimistic suspect it’ll simply jumpstart the next wacky cycle. Stay tuned.

]]>No publisherHeard Around the West2015/02/16 03:10:00 GMT-7ArticleThe increasingly unequal Westhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/increasingly-unequal-west-economy
Rich get richer while everyone else wallows in a region once known to be economically egalitarian.Los Alamos, New Mexico, with about 10,000 people living in mid-century suburban homes amidst heavily secured labs, is probably one of the weirder towns you’ll ever visit. Where else can you stand on the corner of Oppenheimer Drive and Trinity Street? With more than 900 millionaire households and a median household income of $107,000, it’s also one of the richest towns in America.

It’s a vastly different world than you’ll find just 18 miles away, in Española, another town of about 10,000 people, this one situated along the waning waters of the Rio Grande. Here, the homes are much, much older, and anything but suburban. The median household income is $33,000, less than one-third that of Los Alamos’s, and 28 percent of the residents live under the poverty line.

The economic imbalance between Los Alamos and Española may be extreme, but the dynamic is common. In his State of the Union speech last month, President Obama highlighted the growing gap between rich and poor in America, and its damaging effect on the social and economic fabric of the country. And as a recent Economic Policy Institute report shows, the West, which was once more economically egalitarian than the rest of the nation, is now becoming more and more a region of haves and have nots, with very little in between.

While there are a variety of measures of income inequality, perhaps the most straightforward is the percentage of income held by the top 1 percent. The higher the percentage, the greater the inequality (the more the rich have, the less there is leftover for everyone else). At the end of the 1920s, that era of untethered capitalism, the richest one percent was bringing in a whopping 24 percent of the total income. The Great Depression, the New Deal, World War II and progressive tax policies put an end to that, and throughout the ‘50s, '60s and '70s, the 1 percent held about 10 percent of the income. But starting in the 1980s, the rich began getting richer, and the wealth didn’t do much trickling down — by 2007, just before the Great Recession, the 1 percent once again held 24 percent of the income. Another way to put that: In 2012, the average income for the 1 percent was $1.3 million, or 30 times more than the average for the other 99 percent.

The West has generally followed the same pattern, but historically, the income gap was less pronounced, with the wealthiest Westerners typically having a slightly smaller percentage of the region’s income than the rich in other regions. Beginning in the 1990s, however, the West’s income gap began growing. Now our region is just as unequal, and in some cases far more so, than everyone else. Take Wyoming, one of the most glaring examples. In 1928, the 1 percent had 12.2 percent of the state’s income (compared to 24 percent nationwide); in 1979 it had dropped to less than 10 percent; but by 2007, Wyoming’s wealthiest had 31.4 percent, giving it the nation’s third highest, top-heavy concentration of income, after Connecticut and New York. Another way to put it: Between 1979 and 2011, the top 1 percent's collective income grew by 172 percent; the bottom 99 percent's shrunk by 2.5 percent.

For the 1 percent, the Great Recession and its accompanying dent in the housing and stock markets, was just a little bump in the road to greater riches. They’ve recovered healthily, their collective income jumping back up even as the rest of us have fallen further behind. The causes of the increasing imbalance are myriad, write the authors of the EPI report, ranging from the demise of unions, to stagnating working class wages, to skyrocketing pay for CEOs.

Such forces are also in play in the West. But in the case of Wyoming, where the balance has shifted so dramatically over the years, something else must be happening. Perhaps more of the nation’s ultra-rich — the average income of the top .1 percent in that state is an astounding $368 million — are making the state their primary residence, drawn by its lack of state individual and corporate income taxes.The shift may also reflect a change in the structure of the extractive industries. Back in the day, it took a heck of a lot more people to produce a ton of coal or a barrel of oil than it does now, and most of those people were unionized, permanent workers who made a good wage and built up the middle class. The wages are still high, but there are fewer workers, the unions have faded and transient contractors make up a larger share of the extractive workforce, particularly in the oil and gas patch. Service industries, where wages tend to be lower, represent a larger sector of the economy. And in many Western states, regressive tax policies drain the pockets of the poor and middle class, while taxing the über rich at ever-decreasing rates.

As the middle class disappears so does the main driver of our economy, middle class purchasing power. And thus, the economy as a whole suffers, further exacerbating the wage gap. As the poor get poorer, they are less and less able to get a decent education, or pull themselves out of poverty. Economic mobility suffers. The authors of the EPI report conclude:

In the next decade, something must give. Either America must accept that the American Dream of widespread economic mobility is dead, or new policies must emerge that will begin to restore broadly shared prosperity.

Since the “1 percent economy” is evident in every state, every state—and every metro area and region—has an opportunity to demonstrate to the nation new and more equitable policies. We hope these data on income inequality by state will spur more states, regions, and cities to enact the bold policies our nation needs to become, once again, a land of opportunity.

Jonathan Thompson is a senior editor atHigh Country News. Homepage photograph of a protestor at the Occupy the Round House rally in Santa Fe, 2012, courtesy Flickr user suenosdeuomi.

]]>No publisherEconomySocial JusticeWyoming2015/02/09 04:10:00 GMT-7ArticleGoats at the table, and bobcats on (in) the grill…http://www.hcn.org/issues/47.2/goats-at-the-table-and-bobcats-on-in-the-grill
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.GOATLANDGoats are enjoying the spotlight. Yes, goats. On YouTube, for example, you can join 28 million others in watching a video of “goats yelling like humans.” Thirteen million have watched “Buttermilk,” an excruciatingly cute kid — the four-legged kind, not your adorable nephew — abuse his yard mates by jumping over them or on them. It’s even spawned a video game, one of several involving goats. The “evil goat from hell terrorizes town” category is slightly less popular, but has plenty of followers.

NPR has a blog called Goats and Soda, though it doesn’t appear to be about either goats or soda, and the Washington Post’s Wonkblog recently came up with a map that purports to show the location of every single goat in the United States. And you thought they were keeping an eye on you, silly kid. It was the blog’s most-read story for a day or two, picked up by dozens of other media outlets.

According to the map, which was put together using data from the agricultural census, Sutton County, Texas, which boasts 55,000 billies, nannies and kids, is the goat capital of the U.S. Not far behind, though, are counties in northwestern Arizona that overlap the Navajo Nation. Apache County, for example, has 26,000 goats, more than one for every three humans. Churchill County, Nevada — home to a giant goat dairy — has almost 14,000 goats, and California’s Stanislaus County has 21,000.

Some of the nation’s 2.6 million goats are milked. Others, like the “Goat Grazers” in Nevada, are hired out to eat invasive weeds and even discarded Christmas trees — actual conifers, we hope, not plastic imitations. Still others are so famous that they are the honored guests of increasingly popular “Goats and Grenache” dinners. We’ve never been to one, but like to picture the billies and nannies dressed in formal attire, sipping fine wine and sharing the latest goat gossip. Though no doubt everyone is too polite to mention the main reason folks raise goats in the U.S.: For their meat. Not the kind of thing you bleat about at the table.

GRASSLANDSurely you’ve heard about the glut of natural gas in the U.S., which has kept heating bills low and the gas patch economically depressed. And then there’s the oil glut, which has pushed gasoline prices so low that people are buying cars the size of houses again. But in Washington state, a similar glut has struck another natural resource: Weed.

When outlets began selling newly legalized marijuana this past summer, they couldn’t keep the stuff in stock, and prices skyrocketed. The growers responded. Now, there’s so much out there — 31,000 pounds, according to the Associated Press — that wholesale prices have crashed, putting farmers in a bind. (The price drop has yet to hit retail outlets, which still charge $25 or more for a gram.) Some farmers say that the low prices, combined with the high taxes, have forced them to sell their latest crop at a loss. In other words, they’re now in the same boat, or tractor, as all the other farmers.

Colorado, which also legalized recreational marijuana sales, has avoided the glut issue by regulating production. Demand remains greater than supply. But the state’s run into its own problems, namely: exploding homes. Seems that amateur chemists and would-be entrepreneurs are trying to create hash oil, or concentrated marijuana, by forcing butane through raw marijuana. The butane vapors concentrate, and, if someone lights a match, Boom. And no, not the economic kind.

THE URBAN WILDA couple hit an unknown animal that bounded into the road in front of them in Scottsdale, Arizona on a Friday night. When they reached their destination, they realized that a still-living 7-pound bobcat was trapped in their Mazda’s plastic grille. State game and fish officials rescued the cat, which spent a week in rehab before being released back into the wild, no doubt still dizzy. Not far away, a 44-pound beaver wandered into Tempe Town Lake and was captured by wildlife officials. It, too, will be released into a wilder area. It is not known whether officials will use the same method used to relocate beavers in Idaho in the 1940s: Officials boxed them up, flew them over the wilderness, and parachuted them safely to the ground. We love to picture them wearing cute little WWII aviator outfits. In San Diego, a five-and-a-half foot, 5-pound snake slithered out of a toilet in an office building; it (the snake, not the toilet) apparently belonged to a resident, and may have turned to plumbing in search of water. And a Seattle dog named Eclipse has learned to take the public bus from its owner’s home to the dog park, without a human companion. Man walks dog. Dog walks man. Dog rides bus. We have clearly outlived our usefulness.

]]>No publisherHeard Around the West2015/02/02 04:05:00 GMT-7ArticleThe Cow Liberation Moovement, bear tizzies and morehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/47.1/the-cow-liberation-moovement-bear-tizzies-and-more
Mishaps and mayhem from around the region.BOVINE RETRIBUTIONMany things define the West: our vast swaths of public land, our fiercely independent spirit and, of course, our cows and the zany — sometimes disturbing — ways we interact with them, whether living or dead. Consider this Salt Lake Tribune headline: “Dead cow clogs Utah slot canyon; rancher’s impromptu barbecue makes things worse.” You know you want to know what happened. Well, in early December, the cow in question ambled down Peek-a-Boo canyon in southern Utah’s Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, apparently unaware that ungulates of its ilk are forbidden. When the cow’s owner found out, he headed out on his ATV (also forbidden) to retrieve the cow. Slot canyons are skinny; the cow was not, and it became irretrievably jammed. The frustrated rancher then shot and killed the cow. He tried to extract the carcass, first by butchering it, then by burning it. Neither succeeded. As of mid-December, monument staff were still trying to remove the carcass. In the meantime, hikers are forewarned: That thing that smells like a charred, dead cow really is.

And in Pocatello, Idaho, a cow escaped the frying pan in December only to end up in the line of fire. An unhappy heifer bolted from a butcher shop’s chopping block, racing out into the town. Local cops gave chase, and the desperate cow rammed an animal-control truck and two police cars, according to the Idaho State Journal. Police officers, concerned about the safety of residents, shot the cow once, without result, then again, fatally. The former cow was returned to the meat-processing facility from whence it escaped.

Meanwhile, in Salmon, Idaho, cows have been vanishing at an alarming rate. Modern-day rustlers are believed to be trying to cash in on high beef prices. It’s a logical explanation. But then again, with cows elsewhere hiding out in slot canyons and busting out of butcher shops, you gotta wonder. … Is the Cow Liberation Moo-vement to blame?

ARIZONARural Westerners are so accustomed to seeing bears roam residential streets that they barely notice. Except in suburban Mesa, Arizona, where a single black bear sighting sent everyone into a tizzy. After local television channels showed aerial footage of the bear “on the loose” (as if bears aren’t supposed to be “on the loose”), running from wildlife officials through an alfalfa field à la O.J. Simpson in his Ford Bronco, folks headed out to watch the show in person. Social media was abuzz, and the bear even got his own Twitter account. Unlike the Pocatello runaway cow, the bear was deemed no threat, and it eluded its tranquilizer-dart-shooting pursuers for several days. Finally, on Christmas Day, it was captured and relocated to more bear-appropriate habitat in nearby mountains.

THE OIL PATCHIf you want to see how plunging petroleum prices are affecting oil country, look at applications for drilling permits (down), rig counts (down, but still higher than this time last year) and rents in the boomiest of the boomtowns, Williston, North Dakota. According to Craigslist, in early January, Williston rents were holding steady, i.e., hovering in the stratosphere: Two-bedroom apartments are still listed for up to $2,500. In other words, the boom hasn’t busted. Yet. We checked out the “Bakken Oilfield Fail of the Day” Facebook page, which documents equipment breakdowns and truck crashes, and also serves as a general soundboard for oil-patch workers and residents. There, opinion regarding oil prices is also mixed, with some posters forecasting an imminent crash (“work has definitely slowed down the last two months”), while others cling, cautiously, to optimism. (“Take a deep breath. Do not jump ship. This is the patch. It always bounces back.”) And some, though concerned about the impact of low oil prices, see a silver lining, particularly when it comes to what they regard as justice for local landlords: “What goes around comes around. I hope their greed comes back to bite them in the a--.”

AROUND THE WESTIn Wyoming, a man was shot by his dog when the dog jumped on a loaded rifle in the backseat of the car. The man survived; the dog, as far as we know, avoided arrest, without having to argue about standing its ground. Twenty-one elk died in Colorado after falling through the ice on a reservoir south of Pagosa Springs. When a moose was buried by an avalanche in Hatcher Pass, Alaska, in late December, a group of passing snowmobilers dug it out. “It didn’t even fight us,” a rescuer told Alaska Dispatch News. “It was like, ‘Help me. Help me.’ It was totally docile and let us touch it. It just (lay) there.” The moose survived, apparently unharmed. And officials from Canada’s national parks are placing red plastic chairs, costing $550 per pair, at various locations in the parks to help people “connect with nature.”

]]>No publisherHeard Around the West2015/01/19 03:00:00 GMT-7ArticleAfter a ski patroller’s death, a flurry of questionshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/ski-patrol-death
Forest Service permitting issues complicate a southwestern Colorado tragedyIt’s mid-December, grey and cold outside, the snow that should be here conspicuously missing. But inside the windowless U.S. District Court building in a Durango, Colorado, business park, there is no season, just beige walls illuminated by overhead fluorescents. Doug Sutton and a handful of friends and relatives stand around in the hallway outside the courtroom. Sutton, dressed in a tweed blazer, scarf and tattered, stained jeans, looks out of time and out of place. He also seems despondent, despite the fact that he arguably just won, if there could be a winner in such a situation.

A few minutes earlier, U.S. Magistrate Judge David L. West ordered Randall Davey Pitcher, the 52-year-old CEO of Wolf Creek Ski Area in southwestern Colorado, to pay a fine and serve probation for conducting search and rescue training and avalanche research without a permit on Forest Service land outside of the ski area last winter. It’s a petty offense and almost certainly would have gone unpenalized — except for a tragic circumstance. During one of the unauthorized training missions, 38-year-old Wolf Creek senior ski patroller and avalanche technician Colin Sutton, Doug’s son, had been swept away and killed by a large avalanche.

Colin Sutton was a Wolf Creek patroller for 12 years, and had been skiing since he was 3.

Jason Lombard, Courtesy of Wolf Creek Ski Area

Pitcher not only lost a friend in Colin, but the charges and the resulting proceedings have also brought attention of an unwelcome kind. Pitcher has long been a darling of the media for taking a maverick approach to running his family’s tiny, unconventional ski area and resisting corporate glitz, for refusing to bet on real estate and teaming with environmentalists to beat back a Texas billionaire’s plan to build a small city adjacent to the ski slopes. Despite a reputation for high safety standards, Pitcher is now being portrayed, by Sutton and some media reports at least, as a maverick of a different sort: One who plays fast and loose with the rules, possibly endangering his colleagues.

Since the accident, Doug Sutton has been a thorn in Pitcher’s side. He’s badgered Forest Service officials as to how they could not have been aware of the unauthorized work, he’s alerted media to the charges filed against Pitcher and he’s written letters to the sentencing judge, encouraging him to be stern. That Pitcher received the punishment he did, more even than the prosecutor asked for, is probably in part due to the efforts of Sutton and other family and friends. So, yes, if this were a game, Sutton might have won. But it’s not. It’s a tragedy. It’s the owner of a small ski area trying to grapple with the fallout of a fatality on his watch. It’s a grieving father trying to find a shred of relief, some closure and perhaps a bit of justice.

When the storm finally moved in, slow and wet, at the end of February 2014, it was like cool salve on chapped skin. Sure, the winter had started out with some decent snowfall, enough to blanket the slopes and keep the ski areas going. But it was just a tease, followed by a long dry spell. Day after day of sunshine and long, cold nights, stretching through January, caused that early blanket of snow to rot, its structure and consistency breaking down to something resembling refined sugar.

The pattern was typical for the San Juan Mountains in southwestern Colorado, as was the moisture-laden storm that came inland off the Pacific. Such storms slam into the wall of mountains rising up from the Colorado Plateau and dump their load. The heavy new snow is strong — its crystals bond to one another in a way that lends itself to making snowballs, or staying put on a steep slope. But the stuff it piles upon, that old, rotten layer, is weak. As a result, slabs of the strong, new snow break free from the rotten layer below, sliding down the mountain — an avalanche.

This weather pattern has led to a 150-year-long string of late winter and early spring tragedies: On St. Patrick’s Day 1906, a dozen miners are swept to their deaths when an avalanche plows into their boarding house above Silverton, Colorado. Six decades later, also in March, a reverend stops to put chains on his car. The East Riverside slide tosses the car, his two daughters and him into the gorge to remain buried and lost for weeks. Twenty-nine years later, almost to the day, state highway plow driver Eddie Emil is killed by the same slide.

In more recent decades, the victims of San Juan snow mostly have been backcountry skiers or snowmobilers. Lured by the deep powder and the alpine light as the earth tilts away from winter’s darkness, outdoor recreation lovers tend to push it a little too far, their weight and movement the straw that shatters the fragile bond between new snow and old. Even a small slide can bury and kill a person. A catastrophic failure can send hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of snow hurtling down mountainsides at speeds of up to 200 miles per hour, snapping trees like toothpicks, tossing skiers and even snowmobiles about like toys. If the victim survives that trauma, and ends up buried alive, he’ll have precious little time to be rescued. Few are.

Avalanches killed eight people in Colorado last winter, nearly all of them at play. They were snowmobilers, skiers, snowboarders. After each loss, mourners found comfort in the fact that they “died doing what they loved,” the secular, outdoor-junkie’s analogue to the Christian platitudes that the dead have “gone to a better place.” Here in southwestern Colorado, the mantra comes up often, as a disproportionate number of locals have been taken by avalanches.

So when, on March 4, news rippled through the community that a backcountry skier had been killed by an avalanche in the remote South San Juan Mountains near Wolf Creek Ski Area, most assumed that it was another sad case of someone dying doing what they loved — another recreationist who had pushed the limits too far. And in a way it was. Colin Sutton cherished the outdoors and loved to ski.

This accident, however, was different, complicated by the fact that Sutton was on the clock as a ski patroller, a job he'd held for 12 years, when he died. He was doing avalanche training and research for Wolf Creek, work ultimately intended to prevent people from dying while doing what they loved.

Ski patrolling is a tough, dangerous and under-appreciated job anywhere. But the Wolf Creek patrollers are a breed apart. They not only keep an eye on patrons of the ski area, but they also serve as a professional backcountry search and rescue team for a good swath of the South San Juan range. The team has responded to dozens of reports of injured or lost backcountry travelers; once they rescued, alive, a man who had been given up for dead. They even help out with traffic accidents: In 2001, when a van carrying 18 Mexican nationals plummeted off the road, Wolf Creek staff were the first on the scene, their prompt and professional response again saving lives. Unfortunately, their efforts couldn’t save one of their own: Colin Sutton.

Even those who had only caught a glimpse of the “Tao of Sutt,”remembers a kind and quiet man, who “exuded intelligence and competence.”

By the time the end-of-February storm cleared out on March 2, three feet of snow had piled up on Wolf Creek Pass. The Colorado Avalanche Information Center’s website rated the avalanche hazard in the South San Juans as “considerable” above tree line, and “moderate” below, with “Persistent and Deep Persistent Slab avalanche problems, breaking on layers of faceted snow buried 3 to 7 feet below the snowpack surface.” Nevertheless, when four Wolf Creek ski patrollers set off explosives on March 3 on Diablo Ridge, near Conejos Peak, about 15 miles from the ski area, they got no results — the snow held.

The following day, another team of four patrollers, including Sutton, headed back out via helicopter to Diablo Ridge. Two of them dug pits to analyze the various layers of the snowpack before skiing down a slide path to where the helicopter would pick them up. Sutton then skied partway down the slope to dig another snow pit and gather more data, while his partner watched from above. Apparently alarmed by what he found, Sutton radioed his partner and told him to stay put while he skied to a safe location, from where he’d give his partner the go-ahead. He made a few turns, and then the snow failed.

It was a medium-sized slide, but big enough to “bury a car or break trees,” according to the CAIC report. It caught Sutton, hurtling him hundreds of feet down the slope, burying him under five feet of snow. The other three patrollers raced to the slide and began a search, finding Sutton about a half hour later. They attempted CPR on their pulseless colleague for two hours to no avail, before loading him onto a Flight for Life helicopter. He was pronounced dead at Mercy Medical Center in Durango, four hours after the slide.

Less than a week later, hundreds of mourners gathered outside of Durango to pay tribute to Colin Sutton, a man who touched many lives, and even left an impression on those with whom he had only a passing acquaintance. One of those who had only caught a glimpse of the “Tao of Sutt,” remembers a kind and quiet man, who “exuded intelligence and competence.”

A shotgun sits on the kitchen counter of Doug Sutton’s home, some 13 miles south of Durango, when I visit on an August day. It doesn’t exactly settle the sense of unease I feel about doing this story. Give me a tale about the chaos of the electrical grid, or the volatile seesaw of energy prices, over the complex mash of human emotion, any day. This story’s too personal, too close, and I know, already, that nothing I write will ease any of the anguish that Colin Sutton’s family and friends must endure.

I didn’t know Colin, not really. But I had met him, two dozen years ago, when his older brother, Bjorn, and I hung out in the same circles in Durango. Colin was just a kid then, living with his mom, Connie Durand, down in Santa Fe. My encounters with him were brief and few, but I do remember him, and what I remember is that he was an uncommonly sweet kid. Mutual friends say that sweetness endured into adulthood, and evolved into a hunger for life and a desire to “do good.”

With a crooked-teeth grin, Sutton assures me the shotgun’s out because a gaze of raccoons had invaded his spread the night before, hungry for chickens or the tomatoes he grows and sells to local restaurants. His property is a verdant anomaly amongst sage and juniper, thanks to Sutton’s skills as a master nurseryman and landscaper. Sutton has white hair, a peppery mustache and round, metal-rimmed glasses. Bjorn arrives a little later, looking just as he did 20 years ago, with a few more lines around his eyes.

While Doug’s manner is intense, even a bit erratic at times — one moment tears are welling up in his clear grey eyes, and then the next he’s joking about shooting raccoons — Bjorn has a steady, calm demeanor, as did his little brother. It’s one reason Bjorn’s in demand as a ski instructor in Aspen, and why Colin’s colleagues trusted him with their lives. Doug and Bjorn slowly fill me in on the story. Later, I confirm the details, and fill in the gaps with the help of other sources.

Between 2004 and 2011, Davey Pitcher was permitted by the Forest Service to conduct helicopter flights, training missions and avalanche work on forest land in order to determine the feasibility of starting a backcountry heli-skiing operation. Heli-skiing’s appeal, however, diminished as recreational snowmobilers, equipped with powerful machines, penetrated deeper into the South San Juans backcountry, leaving precious little untracked powder and quiet skiing for potential clients. Though heli-skiing remains a future possibility, says Pitcher, the feasibility studies, over time, morphed into a search and rescue and avalanche training platform for his staff. After his formal permit expired in 2011, Pitcher stopped filling out the paperwork to renew it, figuring it wasn’t necessary. And the Rio Grande National Forest Service office, either oblivious to what was going on or willingly turning a blind eye to the work, did nothing to stop him.

Soon after Colin’s death, however, the Forest Service looked into the matter, and found that, on at least two occasions, including the day Sutton died, Pitcher had been flying ski patrollers and other employees onto forest land outside the ski area boundaries, and doing research and training without a permit. The federal agency hit Pitcher with five criminal charges, from “conducting work activity on national forest system land without authorization,” to using explosives without permission on public lands. All five charges were mere misdemeanors, and none blamed Pitcher for Sutton’s death. But the language in the statements of probable cause for each citation notes that the “illegal work activity … eventually resulted in the fatality of Colin Sutton.”

"I spent thousands of hours with him (Sutton) over the past 11 years. He was a friend and a co-worker. It’s a tragedy.” — Davey Pitcher, Wolf Creek Ski Area CEO.

At the time, the charges had yet to be covered by any media outlets. By contacting me, and later other reporters, Sutton changed that. Since then, the story’s hit the Denver Post, the Durango Herald, the Pagosa Sun and, in the most depth, the Santa Fe New Mexican. Sutton has also been scrounging information on the accident. His friend and prominent local attorney, Tom Shipps, filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the Forest Service. It yielded nearly 500 pages of documents, all but a handful of them redacted beyond comprehension.

Sutton argues that by operating without authorization, by doing things outside the rules, Pitcher was demonstrating a sort of “maverick” behavior that may have crossed over into the way he runs his avalanche training sessions, and therefore may have contributed to Colin’s death. He pointed out that Colin wasn’t the first ski patroller killed at Wolf Creek. Patrol Director Scott Kay was killed by an in-bounds slide in 2010, while performing avalanche mitigation work on his own, for which the Occupational Safety and Health Administration cited the ski area. This September, OSHA cited Wolf Creek for two violations in relation to Sutton’s death — failure to mitigate avalanche hazard before sending employees in, and an inadequate emergency communication system — carrying a proposed penalty of $14,000.

Sutton also believes that had Colin known the work wasn’t permitted, he would have never gotten on the helicopter in the first place. Indeed, Colin was known as a straight shooter who abided by the rules. But in this case, the rules were anything but clearcut.

I ask Sutton what he wants from all of this. Why torture himself by gathering up all these puzzle pieces when he knows that no matter how he puts them together, the image that emerges will always be the same?

Before he loads me down with tomatoes and sends me on my way, he tells me he’s just hoping to prevent another similar death. He pauses, then adds: “And I’d like justice for Colin.”

Merriam-Webster defines “maverick” as one who does not adhere to the customs or rules of a group. It’s safe to say that, among ski resorts, Wolf Creek is a maverick. And when it comes to ski industry CEOs, Pitcher similarly defies stereotypes. He’s far more likely to be wearing ski gear than a suit; his office is tucked away next to the slopes where he spends much of his time. This unconventional approach has garnered wide praise. “Davey Pitcher is the archetype of what a ski and snowboard resort owner and president should be,” noted a 2012 story in Business Transworld, an industry magazine.

Pitcher was born into the ski industry. His father, Kingsbury, is a legend in the Western ski community, an inductee of both the New Mexico and Colorado Ski Halls of Fame. Kingsbury’s the grandson of Otto Mears, a Russian-born pioneer and businessman who became known as the “Pathfinder of the San Juans” thanks to his prowess in building roads and railroads in seemingly impossible places. Kingsbury spent a good part of his childhood in Silverton and later skied for the Stanford University team. After World War II he advised a variety of developers on where to put ski areas. In 1962, the year Davey Pitcher was born, Kingsbury and his wife Jane took over Ski Santa Fe, in New Mexico.

The area’s still modest compared to the big resorts, but back then it was downright rustic. Skiers were hauled up the mountain by a resurrected mining tram from the mountains above Silverton, with World War II-era bomber seats. Davey sold donuts, candy and pop to hungry skiers, graduated to parking attendant and moved up from there. Meanwhile, his parents added new lifts and turned the once-failing ski area around.

In the mid 1970s, a ski area a few hours to the north of Santa Fe ran into trouble. Wolf Creek was born in 1938 as a rope tow serving a few runs, a long ways from anywhere but the Continental Divide. But the high-altitude slopes received gobs of snow each year. Texas investors purchased it in 1968 but couldn’t make it work. “By 1976, they were finished going broke,” says Davey Pitcher. Kingsbury Pitcher stepped in and bought it.

Helped by leviathan snow years in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the Pitchers turned Wolf Creek around, and it earned a sort of cult following for its tremendous snow and its remoteness, drawing clientele from New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, along with Colorado powder hounds. Still, Wolf Creek lives and dies by that snow alone: While nearly every other ski resort has turned to extensive real estate development, year-round activities, and other non-ski-related money makers, Wolf Creek is still all about skiing. There are no condos or time shares, there’s one simple restaurant, and the nearest lodging is an often treacherous 20-mile drive away.

But various quarters have long tried to cash in on the region’s snow and terrain in a bigger way. In the 80s and 90s, two gargantuan resorts were proposed south of Wolf Creek. Environmental opposition and faulty finances led to their demise.

Persisting, however, has been the proposal by Billy Joe “Red” McCombs, a Texas billionaire, to build the Village at Wolf Creek on about 300 acres abutting the ski area that he acquired in 1986 through a Forest Service land exchange. McCombs originally planned a sort of “boutique village,” with some 200 housing and lodging units. Kingsbury Pitcher liked the idea enough to acquire about a 10 percent stake. But after it languished for over a decade, McCombs brought on Bob Honts, a big-time Texas developer, who had grander dreams for the parcel: Nearly 3,000 condominiums and hotel rooms, more than 100 single-family homes, 222,000 square feet of commercial space and a population of 10,000.

At about the same time Honts got involved, Davey Pitcher took the helm at Wolf Creek. Despite the fact that his ski area would benefit financially from the Village, Pitcher was concerned about its expanded scope, and how it might impact the character of the forest and the skiing. Pitcher divested from the development and engaged in a years-long, litigious battle with McCombs, allying himself with a variety of environmental groups who have tried to halt the plan, and cementing his image as an unconventional ski area operator. "Skier-driven, backcountry-oriented ski areas like Wolf Creek are an endangered species in this state," Pitcher told High Country Newsin 2004. "We refuse to take a ‘build it and they will come’ view of skiing."

This fall, after lying dormant for a while, the Village took a step forward, when the Forest Service gave the go-ahead to another land swap that gives the developers critical road access. Environmental groups filed a host of objections. Pitcher, however, has maintained an ambiguous stance. He supports the land swap, because it puts ecologically valuable wetlands out of the developers’ hands and pushes development away from ski slopes. Honts is no longer the head developer, the village proposal has been scaled back by about half, and McCombs’ daughter, Marsha McCombs Shields, has taken a bigger role. “She’s thoughtful, and she understands the concerns of the communities about the size and nature of Mr. Honts’ proposals,” says Pitcher. “I was reassured by that.”

Pitcher has his own plans for expanding the ski area, but not with real estate or fancy lodges. In coming decades, he wants to add lifts and a low-capacity tram to open up more terrain to lift-accessed backcountry skiing. The area won’t be cutting any new runs under the plan, so environmental opposition is expected to be minimal.

Like his father, Pitcher is a decidedly hands-on ski area operator, in every realm of the business, from painting the buildings, to piloting heavy equipment, to spending a lot of time on the slopes. He’s an active ski patroller and often participates in the backcountry training sessions, even tossing explosives out of helicopters to trigger avalanches. He has a reputation for high standards of safety, bolstered by hiring smart and cautious people like Sutton. And on the many occasions that the ski patrol has responded to search and rescue calls, Pitcher has often been the first on the scene, and has personally escorted victims out of the backcountry.

When Sutton was swept away by the avalanche, Pitcher was already airborne, on his way to join the team at Diablo Ridge. And when Sutton died, Pitcher not only lost an employee, but also a colleague, a friend and, as his attorney later put it, a “brother in arms.” Which is one reason Pitcher bristled when I recently asked about the accident. He feels that the media has been unfair to him in its coverage of the misdemeanor charge. “I take offense at people saying I was just out there fucking off,” he says, audibly upset. “I am sensitive to media portrayal. I really got hammered. I spent thousands of hours with him (Sutton) over the past 11 years. He was a friend and a co-worker. It’s a tragedy."

A view looking up the gully the avalanche ran through. Deep sidewalls were gouged out by the flowing debris.

In November, Pitcher pled guilty to one of the five charges — conducting work activity in the national forest without a permit, on the day Colin Sutton died as well as on two previous occasions. The other four charges were dropped. A few weeks later, he sits before the judge in the Durango courtroom for sentencing.

Pitcher, in a suit, appears uncomfortable, his greying blonde hair disheveled. He’s over six feet tall and powerfully built, like a downhill ski racer, and has the weathered good looks of someone who’s spent much of his life outdoors.

West, the judge, isn’t tossing any softballs today. He grills Brenda Rice, the lead Forest Service investigator, on what the agency knew, and when. (“There’s little, if any, the agency knew about,” she says). He asks if Pitcher had been “taking ski patrollers and personal friends on National Forest land in extreme conditions under the guise of search and rescue and avalanche training?” (Not that she knows of).

Later, the prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney James Candelaria, asks for leniency for Pitcher. The government, he says, considers the permit offense to be petty, and the government, not Colin Sutton or his family, is the direct victim. “I see no mean spirit,” he says, “no intentional act other than a failure to get a permit.” He asks only that Pitcher pay a $5,000 fine, with no restitution, no jail time, no probation. “This is a difficult case,” he adds. “A gentleman lost his life. You can never get past the fact that had they not been up there that day, we wouldn’t be standing here now. The defendant has to carry that burden around for the rest of his life. What happened, happened. Had he had a permit, it would have still happened.”

Pitcher’s attorney, Fredric Winocur, implies that, in fact, the Forest Service was aware that Pitcher was operating without a permit, and that a previous district ranger — who would not cooperate with the investigation — gave the verbal go-ahead to search and rescue training. Sutton’s death was a “devastating loss to the community,” he says, and “it’s natural for the family to assign blame, but that’s not why we’re here. It would be unfair to make ‘failure to comply’ the cause of death.” He read from letters written by county commissioners, the Mineral County Sheriff, current and former ski patrollers and others in support of Pitcher, all of whom pointed out how seriously he takes safety, and how he selflessly volunteers himself and his resources for search and rescue missions.

Finally, Pitcher stood: “The vocation that the patrol follow is a lifelong pursuit and a calling… I believe our intent was good. All I can do is work at moving forward and working with the staff and ensuring that compliance issues don’t occur again.”

Later, Pitcher would explain that Sutton’s death had caused him to reconsider a lot of things. The heli-skiing idea seems even less appealing now, the potential liability that comes with volunteering for search and rescue operations a lot more burdensome. He’s hired a compliance officer to keep permits up to date. “Obviously I want to help people,” he tells me. “I’m not sure what I’m going to do. I haven’t talked to my insurers … I’m just trying to work through this.”

“This is not a civil lawsuit on the wrongful death of Colin,” says West, at the hearing. “This is not involuntary manslaughter with undue cause.” But then he hands down a sentence that goes beyond even what the prosecutor asked for: A $5,000 fine. Five years of supervised probation. And 500 hours of community service, to be served doing search and rescue work with regional entities, which Pitcher has been doing anyway.

“There’s no question that the passing of Colin is a real tragedy,” says West. “It’s not fair when parents outlive their children. No matter what the court does, it won’t change that.”

]]>No publisherColoradoRecreationU.S. Forest ServicePeople & Places2015/01/16 03:00:00 GMT-7ArticleIs altitude causing suicide in the West?http://www.hcn.org/articles/is-altitude-causing-suicide-in-the-west
Researchers find that high elevations may affect our emotions in both good and bad waysThe West’s mountain towns, from Jackson to Taos, Silverton to Park City, Truckee to Ketchum, tend to float to the top of what I’ll call Listicles of Happiness: Those inane rankings of the “best towns” in the nation, whether it’s the best small towns, the best ski towns or, a recent favorite to hate, “20 Colorado Mountain Towns That Are Paradise in Winter,” the writers of which have some fetish for stoplights, or the lack thereof. Judging from these lists, we mountain townies are a joyous bunch, working high-paying jobs that not only allow us to follow our passion, but also to go fly fishing on our lunch break, mountain bike after that (without stoplights to slow us down!), and then, fueled by a runner’s high, party long into the night.

But there’s another set of lists, too, that aren’t published by the usual magazines or websites, but on which those very same mountain towns and states tend to rank highly: The Lists of Misery. Western states are among the national leaders in alcohol abuse and depression rates, and rank low for mental health. A few days ago, the Centers for Disease Control — the usual compilers of the Lists of Misery — put out a report on alcohol-related poisoning fatalities. The Interior West had the highest rates, by far. Then there’s the ultimate List of Misery, suicide rates, which the Interior West has long topped, earning the Rocky Mountain states the morbid moniker of The Suicide Belt.

Suicide rates are far higher in the Interior West than in the rest of the nation.

The root causes of this mountain misery have remained a mystery. Maybe we kill ourselves at a higher rate because we have so many guns at our disposal, and maybe we reach that extreme of misery because we are physically and emotionally isolated: We not only live further apart from one another, but our independent Western spirit prevents us from seeking help and support. Maybe the notion of driving over mountain passes for mental health care is too daunting.

But a group of researchers think they may have found the reason the mountain states top not only the Lists of Misery, but maybe also the Listicles of Happiness: high altitude. Two studies, each by an overlapping group of scientists looking into the matter, were published back in 2010 and 2011. The findings didn’t get a lot of play at the time. But after CDC released its latest data, for 2012, showing that the suicide rate has been increasing nationwide, particularly in Western states like Utah and Colorado, and after an article on the altitude findings was published at Science.Mic in November, the theory attracted more attention.

In the paper “Positive Association between Altitude and Suicide in 2584 U.S. Counties” published in 2011 in High Altitude Medicine and Biology, the authors looked at every county in the U.S., and found a strong positive correlation between the average altitude of the county and the suicide rate. Counties that lie below 2,000 feet above sea level had an overall suicide rate that was about half that of counties lying between 4,000 and 5,000 feet in altitude. Counties above 9,000 feet had the highest suicide rate. And so on. This in spite of the fact that high altitude counties generally have a lower mortality rate from all other causes. The authors note:

Prior reports of increased suicides in the U.S. Mountain Region have prompted speculation that the excess is owing to greater access to firearms, increased isolation, or reduced income. Even after controlling for these variables in our analysis, the positive correlation between altitude and suicide still exists, which suggests that the increased suicide rate in the regions with greatest altitude, such as the Mountain Region, may be owing to, at least in part, its altitude per se.

How could altitude lead someone to end their own life? Possibly through hypoxia, or lack of adequate oxygen to the brain, the phenomenon that causes us to get dizzy, or drunk faster, at high altitude. “Altitude is a well-known cause of hypoxia,” the authors say, “and the greater the elevation, the greater the hypoxia. Chronic hypoxia also is thought to increase mood disturbances, especially in patients with emotional instability.” The authors go on to admit that hypoxia’s effect on mood is complex, and more study is needed.

One of the researchers, at least, has continued that study, and thinks he’s closer to solving the mystery. In the Science.Mic article, writer Theresa Fisher spoke with Utah neuroscientist Perry Renshaw about his findings. Renshaw told her that he believes altitude messes with our bodies’ levels of dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that regulate our sense of happiness. Hypoxia, he says, causes serotonin to go down in our brains (which usually results in depression) and dopamine to increase (which usually creates a sense of euphoria, e.g. “runner’s high”).

Whether this conflicting combination of effects makes us happy or makes us sad depends on the makeup of our brains. Folks with a history of depression are more likely to get more depressed if they move to the mountains, as are women, according to the Science.Mic article. And people who are naturally happy are likely to get downright ecstatic at higher altitudes. And that would explain how so many mountain towns can top both the Listicles of Happiness and the Lists of Misery.

When I first caught wind of the theory a few months ago, it seemed absurd. I’ve lived all but one year of my life between 5,000 and 9,300 feet. Looking back at those times — as well as the year I spent at sea level — I don’t see any correlations between my mental health and the altitude at which I was living. Sure, my sanity often wore a little thin while living in Silverton, Colorado, at 9,300 feet, but then there were many other factors aside from altitude to consider: A tiny populace, psychotic politics, a treacherous drive to the nearest movie theatre and, yeah, I was running the town newspaper, a sure road to mental illness.

Having said all of that, suicide has been a shockingly common cause of death in Silverton since the heydays of mining, and many of its current residents — the ones who aren’t fighting over at Town Hall — can tend to get wrapped up in a sort of hypoxic euphoria. I always thought it was the scenery. Perhaps it’s the altitude.

]]>No publisherPublic healthColoradoUtahNew MexicoCommunities2015/01/14 11:55:00 GMT-7ArticleThe oil boom hasn't busted, but it's straining at the seamshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/the-oil-boom-hasnt-busted-but-its-straining-at-the-seams
Oil patch communities and states are starting to feel the impacts of sliding prices.It was just last month that I asked, in this magazine, whether falling oil prices would kill the shale revolution. At the time, a “low” price for oil was $80 per barrel, which was more than 30 percent lower than the summer high. Surely, if it dropped below that, there’d be trouble in the patch. That seemed unlikely at the time: Many analysts predicted that it was only a matter of days before Saudi Arabia cut production, thus halting the price slide.

What happened, instead, is that the Saudis thumbed their noses at the world’s other oil producers and kept their wells pumping. Meanwhile, the International Energy Agency lowered its global demand forecast for 2015. As a result, prices kept plummeting, first to $70 per barrel, then $60. As I write this, Brent crude — the international benchmark for petroleum — is just below $60, and West Texas Intermediate, our domestic benchmark, is a few dollars below that. Oil prices haven’t been this low since 2009.

And, yes, there is now trouble in the oil patch. The shale oil revolution isn’t dead, by any means. But it’s sick. It’s still too early to tell how deep the sickness will go, since the effects of price swings can take months to manifest on the ground. But it’s been six months since the price slide began, and it’s clear that the oil industry is taking a hit. Here are a few of the signs of the bust:

Rig counts are down: The number of rigs actively drilling for oil and gas in the United States hit 1,931 in September, plateaued through November, and then dropped during the first weeks of December, to 1,893. Texas, which has the bulk of the nation’s rigs to start with, was the leading loser, with 24 rigs packing up and heading home. Western oil and gas states lost one to three rigs each. And while that could be chalked up to seasonal fluctuations rather than prices, those states have been seeing incremental losses since September. Drilling is the most labor- and capital-intensive stage of the production process, so when rig counts decrease, job losses ripple through oil patch economies. While most states still have more drill rigs operating now than they did a year ago, the recent decline is likely only the beginning: Earlier this month, Reutersreported that well permits plummeted from 7,700 in October, to just 4,500 in November, a pretty good indicator of where rig counts are headed. That's good news for the environment, of course -- the greens can thank the Saudis for that.

Jobs are getting cut, slowly but surely: Since the recession began in 2008, oil patch counties have been the brightest spot in the national employment picture. In parts of North Dakota, unemployment has crept close to zero; oil-producing counties in Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado have had similar good fortune. Median wages have skyrocketed by as much as 150 percent over the last decade in some North Dakota counties. That light may be dimming, slightly. In North Dakota, there are considerably fewer job openings in the construction and extraction sector than there were a year ago. That’s not to say people are getting laid off — the state’s data aren’t current enough to determine that — but it does indicate that the oil industry is a little less desperate for workers. Over in Wyoming, meanwhile, the oil and gas sector shed about 200 of a total 18,000 jobs between September and October.

Oil state number crunchers are scrambling to rejigger budgets to account for major revenue dips: Whether or not the low prices actually cause a wholesale pullback on drilling, massive layoffs and a general collapse of the oil industry — a bust, that is — they have a huge impact on revenues for states and counties with a lot of oil production. That’s because, in most cases, oil and gas are taxed, and royalties assessed, based on the gross value of the product, not its volume. If oil prices drop 10 percent below the budget forecast, then, a state can expect 10 percent less revenue from oil. A few months ago, most states were counting on $90-$100 per barrel prices for 2015. Now they’ll be lucky to have a yearly average of $65. For a state like Alaska, which typically rakes in billions in oil severance taxes, that could result in serious budget deficits next year. In New Mexico, each dollar’s drop in the price of oil translates to about $7.5 million less in revenue, meaning they’re looking at losing hundreds of millions of dollars in potential revenue, even if the drill rigs keep cranking at current rates. That’s in a state where oil and gas taxes make up about one-third of the general fund. Wyoming and North Dakota face similar pain.

Domestic oil production is still going strong: Wait. What?! Yes, actual production continues to increase, or at least remain steady, which some might hold up as evidence that the price crash hasn’t hurt the industry. But that’s not how it works. Once a well is drilled, a company is unlikely to shut it down unless prices go really, really low, so it keeps producing. And even if prices plummet, a driller will go ahead with wells that it’s already drilling or in the final stages of planning. There are still almost 1,900 rigs out there churning away at the earth, and when those wells are completed, many of them will have a big initial production rate for a few months, during which overall production will probably continue to increase. As rig counts continue to drop, though, and as production from existing wells continues to decline (and it will), overall production is likely to drop off.

It would be foolish to try to predict what’s going to happen in the next year, or even few months, with oil prices. Most official forecasts anticipate prices staying fairly low for the next year or so. But forecasts are notoriously wrong. One group of folks seems to think that prices will stay low for the long-term: Buyers of ginormous gas-guzzlers. Low oil prices means lower gasoline prices, and that has apparently spurned a bit of a buying spree. If this sickness spreads, the outcome is fairly obvious. The gains we’ve made in fuel efficiency, and the decreases we’ve accomplished in fuel consumption, will be wiped out. Demand for oil will increase. Prices will go back up. And Craigslist will be flooded with ads trying to sell those ridiculous SUVs.

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryEconomyOilNorth DakotaNew MexicoUtahWyoming2014/12/19 04:20:00 GMT-7ArticleKillings by cops are much more common in Western stateshttp://www.hcn.org/articles/the-west-is-rife-with-killings-by-cops
Arrest-related death rates are highest in New Mexico, with Nevada and Oregon close behind. As darkness and a chill fell over northwestern New Mexico on a Friday in late November, two men flagged down a San Juan County Sheriff’s Deputy to report a scuffle, with at least one firearm involved. The altercation was going down in Spencerville, an ad-hoc collection of homes, beat up cars, and dust, that lies just off the highway that links up the towns of Aztec and Farmington. As the deputies responded, they heard gunshots, and called for backup. Three more deputies arrived, along with a New Mexico State trooper.

As the five deputies approached the area from which the shots came, the trooper flanked off to one side, armed with an AR-15. He saw a “silhouette of a person raising a weapon,” according to a court document, and fired two shots. When a male voice screamed that the trooper had missed, he ran to another location, took aim and fired two more shots. The “silhouette,” a 27-year-old Navajo man named Myles Roughsurface, fell to the ground, dead.

Roughsurface was the third person killed at the hands of law enforcement officers in San Juan County this year, and the tenth in New Mexico. As of early December, the cop-related death toll for 11 Western states was at least 181, based on a Wikipedia survey of media reports. National attention has, of late, been on the police killings of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice and Eric Garner in Missouri, Ohio and New York, respectively. But when it comes to the rate of police-related killings per capita, the West is the worst.

The statistics on such things are notoriously incomplete, depending upon individual law enforcement agencies to report the numbers. And the numbers, of course, don’t reveal the circumstances of the death; whether a cop fired out of self-defense or to save the life of an innocent, or whether he acted with excessive force without adequate justification. But regardless of which set of stats one uses, this is clear: Westerners are almost twice as likely as Americans as a whole to suffer from “arrest-related death,” as the Department of Justice terms it, or fatal injury due to “legal intervention,” per the nomenclature of the Centers for Disease Control.

From 2004 to 2010, Americans died from legal intervention — which includes not only homicide, but also dying in custody from accidental causes or suicide — at a rate of .13 per 100,000 people. During that same period of time, legal intervention killed Westerners at a rate of .23 per 100,000. New Mexico cops used lethal force at a higher rate than those in any other state, Oregon and Nevada were close behind, and every other Western state had a rate higher than the U.S. average. As was the case in the U.S. as a whole, African-Americans were the most likely to be killed by cops in the West over that particular period, followed closely by Native Americans, Hispanics and, finally, non-Hispanic whites; during other periods of time, Native Americans are victimized at the highest rate. Three Navajos were killed over a period of just six months in late 2008 and early 2009; one of the victims was killed by the same trooper who shot Roughsurface last month.

Mostly, the killings go down without getting wide media or public notice. But this spring, Albuquerque Police Department officers shot and killed a homeless man, James Boyd, who was armed with a small knife. The killing was caught on video, drawing national attention to the APD’s history of using excessive force, and inspiring protests. Just a month later, the Justice Department released its report — in the works since 2012 — on the department, finding that the “APD engages in a pattern or practice of excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution.” Since 2010, according to a KRQE News analysis, APD officers have shot and killed at a rate of four per 100,000 people, which is more than 30 times the national rate.

Screenshot from an Esquire magazine article about the Albuquerque police department's officer-involved shootings.

Utah garnered unwanted national attention, as well, after officers from the Saratoga Springs police department responded to a report of a man with a samurai-style sword acting suspiciously outside a Panda Express restaurant. After 22-year-old Darrien Hunt, who was black, allegedly lunged at the officers, he was shot dead.

The heartbreaking stories do little to hint at the reasons for what appears to be a Western epidemic. Yet correlations with other stats hint at directions to be explored. Western states, for example, have a much higher suicide rate than other states, a possible indicator that mental illness that goes untreated is more prevalent here. Oftentimes, the victims of police shootings are exhibiting signs of mental illness when they’re shot; one of the victims in San Juan County, after behaving erratically and while fighting with police, slashed his own throat just before an officer shot him in the head.

There’s also a loose correlation in the West between police-related shooting rates and economic health. New Mexico, for example, leads the nation in arrest-related deaths, and also has among the highest rates of poverty and income inequality. That can create an environment of desperation, leading to more crime, which leads to more confrontations between police and the citizenry.

The heartbreaking stories do little to hint at the reasons for what appears to be a Western epidemic.

And then there’s the West’s gun-loving culture and high rates of firearm ownership and firearm-related killings. Gun rights advocates argue that the ubiquity of guns deters crime, because a criminal never knows which average Joe might whip out a pistol and blow the would-be criminal away. That same wariness must extend to police officers: If they’re in a region where guns are everywhere, then when a suspect reaches for something in his pocket, it’s reasonable to suspect that it might be a gun, giving a reason for the police officer to shoot first.

Whatever reason we might come up with for this sort of violent tragedy, it’s not likely to soothe the sorrow of the victims’ families and friends — or the trauma felt by a police officer who shoots and kills someone, particularly if by mistake.

About a week after Roughsurface died, I happened to be driving past the area where the shooting took place. I turned up the county road into Spencerville. It’s rough, to put it mildly, a place where poverty lies out in the open like the torn up mattresses and wheel-less cars. But to those who live there, it's home and, presumably, a sort of sanctuary. Dusk was just giving way to dark, and I drove slowly past the humble houses and the single-wides, not sure what I was looking for.

And there, next to a metal fence, a Christmas-themed teddy bear lay in the dirt next to a row of votive candles, some glowing pale. It was here that Roughsurface went from being a living, breathing soul — an intelligent, "easygoing, mellow guy until someone riles him up," his mother told the Farmington Daily Times —to being just a memory, another statistic.

]]>No publisherGunsNew MexicoCommunities2014/12/12 05:00:00 GMT-7ArticleThe linchpin to a national supergridhttp://www.hcn.org/articles/massive-tres-amigas-project-could-turn-clovis-nm-into-the-linchpin-of-a-nationwide-electrical-grid
Clovis, New Mexico, may link three grids and become a renewable energy hub.At first glance, Clovis, New Mexico, doesn’t seem to be the middle of anything but nowhere. The surrounding landscape is so flat that one could see trees 10 miles away in Farwell, Texas, if there were any trees. Downtown has a certain worn-down, Last Picture Show-like charm, but many of the storefronts are empty, the victim of big box stores outside the town’s center. And then there’s the smell, an indicator that Clovis, population 38,000 actually is the center of something — the state’s burgeoning dairy industry. In fact, Clovis is kind of famous. Remnants of some of the first human beings to roam North America, or “Clovis Man,” were found nearby. And Norman Petty’s music studio, where Roy Orbison, Buddy Holly and other rock 'n' roll greats had their albums produced, was located here.

Clovis, a town of 38,000 in far eastern New Mexico, could be the centerpoint of a national supergrid, and a renewable energy hub.

Jonathan Thompson

Now, Clovis may become famous as the center of something else: A unified, national electrical grid.

If all goes according to plan, ground will be broken in coming months on a vast electrical city of sorts, covering as much ground as Clovis itself, on state-owned land a dozen miles north of town. Tres Amigas, as it’s called, will, for the first time, provide a real link between the three discrete North American electrical grids: the Western, Eastern and ERCOT, or Texas, Interconnections.

That linkage would potentially turn the three grids into one giant one, and it could change the way power is bought and sold. “Conceptually it’s going to send things in an interesting, and new and important direction,” said David Mooney, center director at the National Renewable Energy Labs in Golden, Colorado. “It has the potential of taking very large solar farms (in the Southwest) and taking that power at the peak of its output and shipping that power back east as the sun is starting to go down and utilities are seeing their peak demands.”

If it ever gets built, that is. I traveled to Clovis two years ago to report on this ambitious project — an electrical toll bridge, some call it, or the “Golden Spike” of the grid. At the time, ground breaking was imminent, and we held off on running the story until things progressed. Construction was delayed, then delayed again. In June of 2013 I ran into Tres Amigas CEO Phil Harris at an energy conference in Albuquerque, as the company was about to launch its major financing push, and he said he expected to break ground by the following spring. It didn’t happen. The latest round of predictions had construction starting by the end of this year, when critical deadlines for connecting to the grid will pass. But when I contacted Tres Amigas on Dec. 1, no groundbreaking date had been set.

The delays reveal how difficult it is to raise cash — some $550 million — to build a project that carries rather than generates electricity, even if the project has the potential to be one of the most critical parts of the grid. Tres Amigas would provide not only a physical link between the three grids, but also a real-time exchange system by which utilities and power producers could buy and sell power on a short-term market. That would provide more options for a utility looking for backup power when demand increases substantially, for example, or when intermittent power sources like wind or solar experience natural fluctuations.

While the Clovis facility will be the actual hub through which electricity flows, the project also includes an equally critical marketing hub, where sales of electricity will be brokered on the very short term. “It will be like a commodity exchange,” says Chief Operating Officer Dave Stidham. “(Advanced software) will allow us to make thousands of transactions instantaneously across the Grid. You’ll be able to detect deals and enact them instantaneously. If all of a sudden the price (of electricity) goes up in Nebraska, and the sun’s shining in California (on solar plants), we’ll broker that deal and transfer that power.”

Tres Amigas, if it gets built, will be on state land about 12 miles outside of Clovis - very flat, mostly featureless land, that is.

Jonathan Thompson

Tres Amigas will cover 22 square miles of state-owned land, and is expected to employ some 300 workers during its construction. That will make it one of Clovis' biggest employers, along with the BNSF railroad, Southwest Cheese, and Cannon Air Force Base. When construction is complete, the workforce will diminish substantially, but the project's multi-phase buildout will take years. Clovis originally thought it would get the headquarters and trading floor, too, but that migrated westward to Albuquerque. Clovis simply doesn’t have the amenities to attract the 50 or so professionals needed to run the marketing hub.

Company officials originally considered basing the project in Amarillo, Texas, because, like Clovis, Amarillo is located near where the three grids intersect, and that state has embraced wind power along with the transmission needed to move it around. But officials in New Mexico, where the economy is still struggling from the effects of the Recession, were desperate to entice the project onto their side of the state line. So the state, the City of Clovis, and Bernalillo County (where the headquarters will be located) offered the company generous tax breaks and incentives as a lure. It worked.

When I met with Gene Hendricks, economic development specialist for Clovis Industrial Development Corporation, at his organization’s downtown Clovis office (which doubles as the Norman & Vi Petty Rock and Roll Museum), he was clearly disappointed by the loss of the headquarters from his community. Still, he was optimistic about the project and its impact. The expansive, mostly flat landscape is already desirable for wind and solar producers. Tres Amigas will provide a way for them to hook into not just one, but three grids, with access to millions of potential customers (assuming, that is, that adequate transmission is in place to connect Tres Amigas to the bigger Western Grid). That, in turn, could draw other alternative energy businesses — compressed air power storage, for example, or big battery banks, to the area.

Back in December 2012, at least, Hendricks seemed to think Clovis could someday become as well known for clean power as it is for dairies and Buddy Holly. Who knows, maybe when — or if — Tres Amigas is built, it will provide a catalyst for capturing the methane emitted by the dairies and their thousands of bovine residents, and converting it into electricity to power homes in far off cities.